Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 2 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 3 Film Soleil D.K. Holm www.pocketessentials.com This edition published in Great Britain 2005 by Pocket Essentials P.O.Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ, UK Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing P.O.Box 257, Howe Hill Road, North Pomfret, Vermont 05053 © D.K.Holm 2005 The right of D.K.Holm to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may beliable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 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ISBN 1–904048–50–1 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Book typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 5 Acknowledgements There is nothing like undertaking a project of such scope and detail as this one to reveal one’s own ignorance.To that end this author must salute the following helpers: Mark Christensen, Desiree French, Helaine Garren, Britta Gordon, Charles and Ingrid Gordon, Damon Houx, Anne Hughes, Shawn Levy, Patti Lewis, Cynthia Lopez, Andrea Marsden, Gregg Morris, Michael Russell, Charles Schwenk (a great scholar and a great human being), Steffen Silvis, Sam Smith, Robert Wederquist (DVDJournal.com), as well as the Multnomah County Library, Portland State University Library, Powell’s Books, the Internet Movie Data Base, and the numerous transitory DVD publicists who provided discs.Acknowledgment is also due Ion Mills for the courage to be innovative. Special notice must be paid to Chris Ryall, my editor at Kevin Smith’s adjunct website, MoviePoopShoot.com, where small portions of a few of these reviews appeared. Since the start of this century, Chris has been a supportive editor and a great friend, and so to him this book is gratefully dedicated. Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 6 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 7 Contents 1. Introduction: Film Noir Vs.Film Soleil 9 2. Evil Under the Sun: Film Soleil Defined 13 3. A Film Soleil Filmography and Discography 26 Film Soleil Directors Ranking 28 Sun-Bleached Precursors:The Roots of Film Soleil (1942–1959) 33 Early Film Soleil:The 1960s 54 Early Film Soleil: 1970s 67 The 1980s 90 The 1990s 108 The 21st Century 130 4. Reference Materials 145 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 8 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 9 1. Introduction: Film Noir Vs.Film Soleil Do genres really change? Can they evolve, mutate, and even improve? And if so, when and how? Do we, as consumers really want genres to change? Or are we more delighted by variations within a stable template? And at what point, after a genre has changed, do we give in and admit that what we are dealing with is a wholly new genre, with its own formulae, conventions, prejudices, and viewer expectations? Take the musical. Speaking in broad strokes, its evolution is based partly on technological changes, and partly on shifts in pop culture tastes. Stage musicals had been adapted even to the silent screen, but with the advent of sound, initially movie musicals were mostly set within the musical theater world. Reflecting a movement toward realism found in the theater, movie musicals makers in the 1950s began to set their films in non-musical settings and tell serious stories, as seen as early as Showboat and later in West Side Story.With the rise of youth culture in the mid-1950s, musicals began a shift toward pop tunes and live concert performances. By the end of the century weird hybrids such as Moulin Rouge were perfectly acceptable and understandable to both fans of movies and of musicals. Hollywood movie comedy also has a complex history. Again, in reductive terms, its evolution can be traced from highly visual slapstick in the silent era to verbal “screwball” 9 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 10 D.K. HOLM wit with the advent of sound, then to the dominance of youth culture during the mid-century war years, as mani- fested in the partnerships of Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis, then shifting to the rise of sketch-comedy-based movies targeted to specific demo- graphics, usually based on stories from the magazine National Lampoon or characters and stars from Saturday Night Live. The fate of the western is the worst of all. Once arguably the American movie genre, the one in which Hollywood could talk to Americans about their shared history, the western could manifest itself simultaneously in both low- grade actioners and prestige productions without harming the essence of the genre itself. In fact, the western became so popular in the 1950s that prime time television was inun- dated with programs (Cheyenne, Sugarfoot), most of them from Warner Bros. studios. So many, in fact, that it was as if the American public became so surfeited on the genre that in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s viewers couldn’t bear to expose themselves to it anymore.Worse, younger audiences appeared to have little interest in the western, to the point that what once was traditionally thought of, throughout the 20th Century, as America’s premiere genre could barely be said to exist at the start of the 21st Century. That is certainly the problem facing fans of film noir from the 1970s on. Had noir evolved into a new genre? Since “true” film noir, that is black and white crime films, ended, officially or not, in 1958, can so-called film noirs made after that time frame be anything but pastiches, homage, or paro- dies? And is noir even a genre to begin with? On the one hand you can have a film such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946) with virtually none of the visual cues 10 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 11 FILM SOLEIL associated with noir (Venetian blinds, harsh shadows, dark streets at night) and all of its narrative cues (a femme fatale, love triangles, crimes of passion and profit), while Reign of Terror (AKA, The Black Book,Anthony Mann, 1949) has none of the narrative cues yet all of the genre’s visual hallmarks. “Defining” noir is a task more like classifying architecture.A bungalow is still a house but it is not like a thatched roof Tudor house;we see the differences that link the two houses to their individual categories, yet grasp their broad similari- ties to the larger base set to which they all belong.We’re able to juggle and categorize all this in our mind and the more examples we have at hand the more refined individual defi- nitions become. Critics ranging from Raymond Durgnat to James Naremore have wrestled with just what exactly it is when we speak about film noir. Naremore asserted that noir “functions rather like big words such as romantic or classic.An Ideological concept with a history all its own, it can be used to describe a period, a movement, and a recurrent style” (in More Than Night). Paul Schrader, back when he was still a movie reviewer rather than a director, defined noir as “a period.” Durgnat gave, in passing, perhaps the best definition of noir in his book Jean Renoir: noir, he wrote, is “a crime thriller with a pessimistic, cynical, sardonic approach and mood.” You can get a good sense of the basic noir ingredients from the titles of the plethora of noir books printed since the 1980s. Lonely streets, dead ends, detours, darkness, dark cities, anxiety, crime, the past – few of these iconic compo- nents contribute to film soleil. In soleil, noir returns to its roots in westerns, and all genres meld into one. That leaves the genre open to a lot of morphing. The author of this book is himself uncertain of just what, exactly, 11 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 12 D.K. HOLM noir happens to be, and hesitates to enter very well trodden intellectual ground, sifted over by scores of previous critics in the 100-plus books already written about noir. When I embarked on this project I determined that noir was not a genre but rather more a set of signifiers linked by general and overriding narrative genre conventions. Right now,however, I think that it actually might be a genre, if for no other reason than that it can be replicated in different variations with audiences still recognising a given film as a noir.After publi- cation, I may well revert back to the “mood” thesis. Many aspects considered proprietary to noir are often “in the air.”For example, the noir policiers of the 1940s, with their documentary style elucidations of procedures – as in Call Northside 777 – and the films produced by Mark Hellinger and Louis De Rochemont, are really very like military films of the 1940s, such as Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943) which begins with details of bureaucratic procedures.